


teeth and thorns

by brraveheart



Series: teeth and thorns [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Rose Tyler as the Black Widow, marvel AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 01:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4588512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brraveheart/pseuds/brraveheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happens differently, here. In this version, she’s a ghost story. In this version, she’s a woman credited with at least two dozen assassinations in the past seven years. She still meets him by chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	teeth and thorns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunarsilverwolfstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarsilverwolfstar/gifts).



> This originally started off as a plot bunny planted by lunarsilverwolfstar on Tumblr, which involved dimension hopping Rose meeting up with Peggy Carter and kicking butt across the multiverse. Somehow, that morphed into a superspy!au and I rolled with it. Sorry it took so long to finish!
> 
> Think Rose as Natasha for this one, only instead of finding a dorky SHIELD agent, she gets a dorky time travelling alien and his little-big-blue-box. The version of Nine she meets is also a bit softer than the one we see in canon – he’s been on his own longer, and the loneliness is beginning to get to him. May or may not continue in this ‘verse with more oneshots, depending on the feedback.
> 
> This was also initially going to be a multi-chapter piece, but I am incapable of slowing my pace, apparently. This is the end result.

_everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it – david foster wallace_

* * *

 

She thinks she sees monsters in her sleep.

She swears it. She stays up until the early hours of the morning and counts the sticky stars on her ceiling, waiting for the thing in her closet or her chest to come bounding out, whichever’s quicker, whichever wants her more. She lays in bed for hours until exhaustion wins out over sleep.

Rose doesn’t fear the dark, but rather, the things that hide there.

This is how she grows.

* * *

_When she tries to remember what kind of life she lived before, she remembers this: a shabby flat on the far side of a city she can’t remember. A little girl with dark brown pigtails and eyes like the sun. A boy who’d given her a gap-toothed smile and a fistful of wildflowers from the park, and when she’d kissed him on the cheek for his trouble he’d laugh-screamed “cooties” at her before running in the other direction._

_She remembers a woman – blonde, smiling, a force of nature, a natural disaster. Hands on her hips and the last time Rose had ever seen her, she’d cried and cried and cried_

_(her tears made mascara tracks; they looked like the wolves had dragged the caribou across her cheeks)_

_There had been a man there, too – he’d had black eyes and burnt-out stars in his chest. He didn’t know the meaning of the word gentle;_

_he didn’t know what mercy meant._

* * *

 

She tracks a man in Shanghai, on orders from above. It’s 2005 and she’s only been nineteen for about four hours, but what’s age matter when every day of your life is spent on a knife’s edge?

Tonight, she’s going to kill a man who might have a wife waiting at home. Tonight, she might kill a would-be father. Tonight, she will definitely kill a killer.

Tomorrow, she’ll wake up alone in a different city and do it all over again.

She’s learned not to think about it too hard.

* * *

 

_They train her young._

_She doesn’t understand it at first, but then, why would she? They take her from her home in the middle of the night and she’s not so sure about the man with dead galaxies in his eyes but she knows he’s not good, can’t be good, and he seems to get really annoyed whenever she asks about her mother so eventually she just stops asking._

_The days and months following the last day she ever sees her mother are punctuated by certain things: the cold and the gray, and numbness of her hands when she wakes up in the morning, cuffed to a bedpost. They tell her it’s so she won’t try and run – they tell her she won’t need the cuffs, eventually._

_There’s a lot of girls with her in this place, but only one catches her eye – she’s sweet and pretty and English, too. She calls herself Keisha, and she’s in the bunk across from Rose when they first get there._

_The days roll by like dice on a game board, and they begin to learn the ropes of this new life – get up, eat, recite, train, eat, train, shower, sleep. It’s like clockwork, their schedule, the hours punctuated either by “I’ll wash and sew and clean and cook if you let me stay here” or punching her companions into the dust or snow._

_(the first time she ever sees a girl get killed in one of those training sessions, she’s six and a half years old – Andrea Pierce throws the last punch and Emilie won’t get up off the ground so Andrea keeps hitting her until the snow is stained red)_

_Days turn to months and months turn to years._

_(she’s eight when she kills somebody for the first time – she’s sparring with Keisha until suddenly she’s not, until she remembers Keisha is two inches taller than she is but that doesn’t matter if you’re quick enough, if your arms are around her neck, if you can twist at_ just _the right angle –)_

_Rose sleeps facing the wall, now._

* * *

 

She’s in London some weeks later, on a solo assignment to take out some bloke who moonlights as a department store electrician. This isn’t her first mission alone, but something’s different tonight – something in the air, maybe. She’s never been to London before, strangely. Maybe it’s just the new city.

It’s what she tells herself, anyway. There’s a sort of lingering familiarity about this place, about the people – like a dream she can’t quite recall.

It hardly matters anymore, she supposes. A passing fancy that should hurry up and pass; she’s off to kill the fake but somebody else beats her to it, or some _thing_ else, as it is – the department store dummies that try and box around her get two bullets through the head each for their trouble, but they don’t even flinch. They just keep moving, arms outstretched, menacing despite their nonexistent faces.

She stumbles back – surprised, fearful, she doesn’t know but she _doesn’t_ like it – and for a moment, just a moment, she feels something so disturbingly close to _helpless_ it _disgusts_ her –

And then a hand grabs hers, tight and warm and firm, and she whips her head around to look at who it is because where the fuck is her head right now, that she didn’t even notice some _man_ come up and take her hand like that?

She barely has a moment to drink him in – his tragic blue eyes, the close-cropped hair, the line of his mouth that can only speak of demons – before his fingers clench tight and he breathes, “Run.”

She does.

* * *

 

_“Who are you?” one man in Moscow asks, his voice rough with fear when his friend drops to the ground, grasping at his neck as if that will stop the bleeding. This is her third ever mission – she’s fourteen and miles from where she’d started, and her handler is at the warehouse waiting for her report, so she knows she should be quick._

_She still pauses to stare, forcing down the growing feeling of_ wrong, wrong, wrong, not right, not right, you’re better than this – she taught you _better_ than this.

 _Who’s_ she _?_

 _Why does_ she _matter?_

_“I’m Rose,” Rose murmurs, because she only ever gives her real name to people who won’t live long enough to share it._

_The man’s body hits the snow two seconds later, and she walks away shivering._

_Not from the cold._

* * *

 

He disappears like a ghost, ushering her outside and falling to ash with the rest of the department store.

_Do you know like we were saying? About the Earth revolving?_

She runs because she’s not sure what else to do; because she’s seen a lot of _shit_ in her nineteen years of life, but this – well, this. This is something else entirely.

_It’s like when you’re a kid. The first time they tell you that the world’s turning and you just can’t quite believe it because everything looks like it’s standing still._

She’d spent the rest of the night tracking him, finally cornered him loitering by some run-down dump of a place called the Powell Estate. He’d tried to run, and she’d followed.

_I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. And the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour and I can feel it. We’re falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go –_

He’d tried to scare her away, like any good monster would. But as it is, he isn’t very good at being a monster, and even if he was, she knows better than to run from those – she’s a monster too, and she’s had decent practice being one, anyway.

_Forget about me, Rose._

She only gives her name to people who won’t live long enough to share it.

This time, she thinks, might be an exception.

* * *

 

_Some nights, when the nightmares get so bad they have to fall to ash, she dreams of wolves._

_Wolves with large, gray paws. Wolves with claws, and teeth. Wolves with eyes so yellow they’re gold. Wolves. Wolves in the night. Wolves that prey on the reckless and sad._

_Wolves, and there’s this girl. Usually in blue, sometimes not. Sometimes with dark hair, sometimes not._

_She doesn’t talk much, but she calls herself Idris._

* * *

 

She follows this man to the edge of London.

Winds up in his pretty big blue box, with its flashing lights and unbefitting levers on the console, gaping at the technology and wondering, not for the first time in twenty-four hours, if maybe that guy in Prague slipped something in her drink. Maybe she’s still in that run-down motel room. Maybe he’s not dead, but long, _long_ gone. Maybe she’s hallucinating this whole fucking thing.

But then he looks at her, with those odd eyes of his, mouth parted slightly. “Any questions?” he asks. His voice sounds hoarse.

“You’re an alien.” Not a question, then, but she’s not about to ask any. She’s not sure why she trusts him so much. He plays at clueless, but she knows better. He’s cleverer than that, and that makes him dangerous – a lot of things make him dangerous, but for the first time in her life, Rose doesn’t feel like she’s in danger.

This feeling is only strengthened when he nods once. “Yeah.” A pause. “There a problem with that?”

“No,” she says, and is surprised to find it’s true.

He nods again. “Can _I_ ask a question?”

She shrugs. She’s uncomfortable, but fair’s only fair. He steps a little closer to her, watches intently as her body stiffens at the sound of his boots on the metal grating. “How old are you?”

It’s not quite the question she’d been expecting, but she has a feeling that this is one man that will never live up to whatever expectations she may have. She clears her throat. “Nineteen.”

_(she wonders why it’s so easy to tell him the truth; wonders why he’s the one she chooses to do it with. she wonders how he’s able to pull it out of her, like poison from a gaping wound)_

There’s a beat of silence before he makes a small noise of acknowledgement at the back of his throat. He moves away, dancing around the console in the middle of the room, flipping levers and pressing buttons.

He doesn’t say anything more.

* * *

 

_Emotions are useless._

_It’s something Rose learns quickly. Love and anger, and hatred and the gift of trust – it is all without function, without proper use._

_What use is it to hate or to love or to trust anyone when the only certainty in life is that you will die? That_ they _will die?_

_There is only one rule, in her world: stay alive. For as long as you can._

_Your chances of following that rule, Rose has found, diminish greatly if you let people get too close. If they don’t hurt you by dying, they hurt you with a knife twisting in your back._

* * *

 

He saves the world.

She helps, a little.

When he’s captured by those mannequin things, she begins to fight them off in a way she couldn’t back at that department store. There’s this bloke, some civilian mechanic they took as a hostage or something, who’s cowering by the Doctor’s phone box.

He seems familiar, in an offhand sort of way, though she’s not sure why – the past twentysomething hours has been nothing but a running string of déjà vu for her, though she hasn’t let on. But this boy – man – his features are flat and unremarkable, his eyes dark and terrified, and he should be just another _nothing_ in a city full of nothings, but he’s not. He’s not, he’s not.

She doesn’t allow herself to be distracted by him, though. The mannequins come after her, arms raised and used like guns, but she knows guns and she knows how to fight without one.

She manages to toss the four coming for her into the vat the Doctor called the Nestene Consciousness, and when two more try and grab him, she swings down from a chain and kicks those into the screaming, molten liquid too.

She lands with grace, on a platform on the other end of the warehouse, and locks eyes with the Doctor. He’s looking at her like she’s something else entirely, and it’s not the first or last time she’s seen that look, so she doesn’t bother indulging it – instead, she turns her attention to the mechanic left cowering before the space-and-time-traveling-telephone-box.

“Alright there, mate?”

His eyes flash; his fear is replaced by something else, for a moment, something that looks remarkably like recognition. After a moment, he nods, shakily. “A-alright.”

* * *

 

_She’s not sure how to describe it. The feeling she gets, when she spares someone, or – God forbid – saves a life. Maybe it’s because she knows that fear, of being so close to the edge of something dark and unfathomable – maybe some part of her never wants anyone else to feel that, either._

_Maybe it’s just a nice change, after everything she’s done._

* * *

 

The mechanic’s name is Mickey.

They wind up outside his place, incidentally – she’s not sure if the Doctor aimed for this destination or if it’s just pure luck, or some information he’d gleaned from the plastic head that’d melted on the console – but either way, that’s where they end up.

Mickey the mechanic introduces himself and says goodbye all in one breath, and she supposes she shouldn’t expect anything less than sheer terror, from somebody like him –  he’s only human, after all. He’s no monster. He practically stumbles out of the TARDIS, as it is, trying to get as fast and as far away from them as possible.

There’s a goodbye, or an attempt at one. She lingers for as long as she dares before she gives the Doctor a sharp nod, ready for everything. She has a handler waiting on a mission report in a tiny, nondescript town, about sixteen miles out of the city – he’s probably getting screamed at by a superior, or is steeling himself _to_ get screamed at by a superior, and wondering where the hell she is. She’ll have to report back soon, and explain why the hit on Wilson James wasn’t necessary. She wonders if he’d believe her.

Probably not.

So, she turns. She tries to leave. But his voice stops her, sort of hesitant, a little grudging, but open enough that she knows he means it when he says, “You could come with me.”

And Rose knows better than to run off with strangers – aliens, she thinks, are an especially big no-no. But there’s something in his eyes that makes her pause, something in his voice that makes her relax. “Why? You know what I am.”

_Murderer. Assassin. Same difference to him, she thinks._

He shrugs, looks a little troubled. “A hired gun, yeah. But you don’t want to be that, do you?”

She stays silent.

“You want out, don’t you? You want to at least _try_?”

“What’s it even matter to you?”

“I want to try, too.”

The tone of his voice only confirms every suspicion she’s had about him – he’s no saint either, is harboring monsters just as big or maybe bigger than she is. She pauses for a moment, considering, and he actually looks _worried_ , for lack of a better word. Like he wouldn’t know what to do if she said no.

She knows that feeling, sort of.

And she has to admit, this – it’s such a tempting offer.

She huffs, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Look,” she growls, “I’ve got somebody waiting for me just outside the city. He’ll be gone by morning if my biochip isn’t functional anymore. It means I’ve died. They’ll grumble, but they won’t bother looking for me. Can you or can’t you get it out?”

She taps the skin at the back of her neck.

He looks – actually – quite pleased. “One biochip? _Easy_.”

And it is, for him – he’s an odd man, but it’s an odd situation, and normally she’d never let anyone so close to her neck, but she’s already broken a lot of her rules for this one – one more, she figures, would hardly matter.

The life she’s lived, anyway – it’s hardly been a life. She hasn’t _lived_ at all.

She’s looking forward to starting.


End file.
